Captain Digital

Random musings on politics, society, and pop culture from the Internet's marketing curmudgeon.

The Annointed One’s Disciples.

Well, it looks like being one of The Chosen One’s Disciples (a.k.a. Obama’s Cabinet Secretaries) is not the kind of gig that either everybody wants or everybody is qualified to take. Keeping score?  So far we’ve had one flameout due to a criminal investigation (Sect. of Commerce), two flameouts for taxes (Health & Human Services, Government Efficiency Czar) and another tax cheat who made it through comfirmation to head the Treasury (including, ironically, the IRS) and one flameout today, for an inability to violate his own beliefs in order to get behind Obamas.

What’s a poor Savior to do? [Read more…] about The Annointed One’s Disciples.

Shaken. Not Stirred.

Treasury Secretary Tim “I didn’t cheat on my taxes…I just didn’t understand the tax code” Geitner was on the Hill yesterday, waxing semi-eloquent regarding the second half of the bank bailout, a.k.a. “TARP II: When Markets Bite Back.” By all accounts (both liberal and conservative), Geitner’s performance was, at best, underwhelming. He appeared nervous and ill-prepared (note to Tim: the unbuttoned shirt collar under the tie didn’t say “man of action” as much as it said “I’d rather be having a root canal than be here today”). Geitner looked, well…shaken. Congress was not stirred by his performance.

If the Obama administration is going to persist in shoveling this kind of pork at us, they’re going to have to find some much more convincing liars to sell it.

The deal here is that no thinking person believes this “stimulus” bill is about stimulating the economy. Everybody knows that it’s a wish-list of the liberal left, masquerading as stimulus or order to get it passed. Evidently, 30 or 40 years of yearning has the Dems throwing caution to the wind, in order to fund their pet projects. See the problem is, in order to stimulate the economy, it’s necessary to do but two things:

  • Spend less money
  • Reduce taxes

Neither of these strategies holds much appeal to the tax and spend crowd. 800 billion dollars is one HELL of a lot of money, and the real scandal is that over 3/4 of the money won’t see hit the economy until well after the first year. Stimulus, shimulus. It’s all shuck and jive to me.

Here’s my idea of a stimulus plan:

  • Reduce EVERYBODY’S tax rate by 20% for the next year
  • Reduce every department (other than the military’s) budget by 20% for the next year
  • Cut all non-essential spending (National Endowment for the Arts, Mohair research, etc.) by 50%

That’s it. The whole thing. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is how you create a stimulus plan that works. To do something like that, it would help to have people that put the public’s interest ahead of their own. Oh, and maybe put somebody in charge of the Treasury Dept. that understands enough about the tax code that he can pay the taxes he owes, and not duck his responsibilities. I can’t see any Democrat doing this, because they are the party of bigger – not smaller – government. There’s not been a Republican since Reagan that had the cojones to even so much as propose this. Pity. We need leaders that will do what works, rather than try and game the system to serve their taste for pork, earmarks, and pet projects. Cut the waste, and the public would grant them a license to thrill.

When Marketers Attack!

I’m in Dallas tonight, an overnight stop on a trip home. I went to Stonebriar Mall to find a replacement case for my crapalicious Window Mobile phone (Never again. Just trust me on this…you do NOT want a Windows Mobile anything. Ever). So I’m walking along, minding my own business, and suddenly I’m accosted by a mall cart sales rep, offering me a free sample of something I don’t want and don’t need. I wave him off. Not to be deterred, he says “can I ask you a question?,” and starts to invade my personal space. Oh, but I’m ready for him this time. “Nope. Sorry…In a hurry…gotta keep moving…thanks anyway,” I say, as I power walk away. You see, I’ve been here before – literally and situationally. The mall cart salesreps are the slimy underbelly of live sales. They prey on people who respond to a question like that with a naive willingness to answer what they think is a reasonable request. If you’re the type that doesn’t wish to offend, you’ve got “sheeple” written all over you as far as these jackals are concerned.

I hate that. [Read more…] about When Marketers Attack!

Why I used to like Garrison Keillor.

G. Keillor - an entertainer who is no longer entertaining
G. Keillor - an entertainer who is no longer entertaining

I love things that are funny. I’m kind of an equal-opportunity fan of humor…I love everything from lowbrow slapstick comedy to very cerebral, sophisticated humor. In 1894, I discovered Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion. I was enthralled. Here was a show and a writer/comedian who was witty in a very subtle, self-mocking way, that struck a chord in me that had heretofore been silent. I immediately sought out as much as I could find on Keillor – his books, recordings,et cetera . A couple of years later, when I heard he was taking his show on tour, I contacted the show and finagled a trip back to Baton Rouge, so I could see the show, live, and interview Keillor.

During the press conference on that Friday afternoon before the first show, I asked Keillor, “how does it feel to be in the buckle of the Bible Belt?” He looked very thoughtful and quiet, and said, “I’ll have to think about that.” Friday evening, as I sat in the audience, Keillor stepped up to the microphone to begin his monologue and said, “this morning, someone asked ‘what does it feel like to be in the buckle of the Bible Belt?’ That question was also on the mind of Senator K. Thorvalsen…” [Read more…] about Why I used to like Garrison Keillor.

Cats & Dogs & Men & Women.

For the record, I never thought I was a “cat person.” I’ve always been partial to dogs. Part of that was because you can train a dog to do what you want. You can’t tell a cat anything. (Well, you can, but not so’s he’ll listen.) When I was a kid, if we had a pet, it was a dog. (Okay. To be accurate, I once had a hamster, and a rabbit that hung himself – named “Lucky,” natch.)

Growing up in Louisiana, you have to take French lessons in school – it’s the law. I hated it, particularly the idea that nouns had gender. How in the Hell can you keep that straight? And why were all dogs “feminine” (la chien) and cats “masculine” (le chat)? I mean, there are male and female dogs, and male and female cats, right? What’s the idea of assigning an entire species a gender? [Read more…] about Cats & Dogs & Men & Women.

Winners…and Winners.

Well, the Steelers pulled it out. At the last minute (well, within the last minute). They are now the winning-est franchise in NFL history. (Which means the Cowboys have GOT to get on the stick and win some more Super Bowls.) But the Cardinals are winners in my book, too. They kept it competitive all the way through the game, and never quit. They had something to prove – that a 9 and 7 team belonged in the big game as something more than a fluke. And prove it they did – they were way more competitive than I’d expected. With a decent season next year, they will finally be able to drive a stake through that ‘curse’ that has put them as perennial losers. They looked like a franchise that could have easily won it all. Next year, they just might. All in all, a good game, an interesting game. And a game that they’ll likely be talking about for years to come. Nice job, gentlemen. On both sides of the field.

Television’s Global Village.

It’s that time of year. Super Bowl Sunday. The one time of year that just about everybody in the country stops what they are doing, to do the same thing. Watch TV. Some watch it because their teams are in it. Some watch because they love football, and are but one game away from going cold-turkey ’til the summer rolls around. Some watch it for the commercials. And some watch it just because it’s the thing to do.

Some (like me) watch it from the comfort of their homes – largely, for me anyway, because I hate cigarette smoke. Some host Super Bowl parties. Some watch from sports bars or other public places. The important thing, though, is that it gives us all a commonality of purpose and experience. [Read more…] about Television’s Global Village.

Stimulate Me!

Washington D.C. seems to be obsessed with the idea of stimulating the economy. On the surface, this seems like a noble idea – our economy is in the tank right now, and the sooner we get it moving in the right direction, the better. Unfortunately, looking to Washington to fix our economy is rather like asking some thug that smashed your car window and stole your CDs to repair the car and give it a nice detailing. And putting Congress in charge of writing a bill to allocate funds for economic stimulus is not too different from putting the foxes in charge of the hen house and expecting the hens to thrive and egg production to rise.

Um…no. Don’t think so. [Read more…] about Stimulate Me!

Project Momentum.

There are two things I hate regarding the realities of business. I hate having to stop work on a project before it’s complete. But I hate having to return to a “cold” project after being away from it for a period of time that’s long enough to make me forget everything about it.

I’ve been working on a video game project lately. It’s not rocket science, but like all projects that require coding, you get into a thousand different decisions and judgment calls that force you to have to go back and remember what you did, why you did it, and rethink your choices.

In a way, it’s more difficult to come back to a project and work on it again (even if you comment your code religiously). It’s kind of like how they say it’s more difficult to relocate down the street than it is to move across the country. Familiarity breeds contempt. Something like that.

I crack open the source code, and I have to spend an hour or so, reviewing what I did – and why I did it. And of course, if I’m adding something, odds are, I’m going to have to either hope I was prescient enough to write code that can be easily adaptable, or code that was designed for expansion.

In a way, it’s kind of an out-of-body (out-of-mind?) experience, akin to the concept used by SciFi writers, where the protagonist is thrown into an alternate universe, where things are almost the same as the way they are back home. But not quite.

No big point here, fans of reason. No solutions offered. No revelations revealed. Just observations. And a wish that it wasn’t so bloody hard for me to go back and edit old code. Sigh…